When Obama was campaigning in 2008 the one good thing I thought might come out of him being elected was better support for FOIA. My experience with FOIA and the Federal Government is that they completely ignore you unless you get a lawyer involved. That’s just wrong. If the people don’t comply with FOIA they should be prosecuted. That’s not what happens. If Obama could make some progress on getting better compliance with FOIA I would have praised that achievement.
It was just another Obama lie.
We are sliding further down the slippery slope into a police state:
The White House is voiding a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA (incidentally the same act that discovered none of Hillary Clinton’s “personal” government-business emails since they were not even stored on government property!) which as USA Today explains, makes “official a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject requests for records to that office.”
Update: More evidence:
The Obama administration set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.
The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
It also acknowledged in nearly 1 in 3 cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law — but only when it was challenged.
Its backlog of unanswered requests at year’s end grew remarkably by 55 percent to more than 200,000. It also cut by 375, or about 9 percent, the number of full-time employees across government paid to look for records. That was the fewest number of employees working on the issue in five years.
I still maintain that the BHO administration is indeed the most transparent we’ve had in a long time. Transparently anti American and transparently communist. Any and all FIOA issues notwithstanding, previous administrations have done a better job at hiding the full extent of their opposition to the American Principles of Liberty. They were thus less transparent than BHO.
Here’s more information: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/03/16/white-house-foia-regulations-deleted/24844253/
“In 2009, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the Office of Administration was not subject to the FOIA, “because it performs only operational and administrative tasks in support of the president and his staff and therefore, under our precedent, lacks substantial independent authority.”
They are just making it official.
But the fact is that Herr Obama has been ruling by diktat and fiat on any number of issues, from pushing back dates written in black ink on a bill he signed (ObamaCare) to having his enforcers in the BATFE change the rules on ammo without an underlying change in law. They’ve been pursuing executive power full speed ahead, not just performing administrative tasks. So if ANYONE should be subject to FOIA, it should be those criminals.
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